Comment Re:Due to programming (Score 1) 223
Is it good for creators? No, GIMP is a laughable replacement for Photoshop and
Illustrator.
Photoshop and Illustrator are 2 different tools. While GIMP lacks the full power of Photoshop,
it provides enough functionality for the majority of needs (my employer and many other companies
limit Photoshop licenses to the marketing division; everyone else has to use something costing
far less - like GIMP (or MS Paint)).
An alternative to Illustrator is InkScape. My Illustrator experience is too limited to compare,
but again, it provides enough functionality for the majority of needs.
(I will also mention Visio and an alternative called Dia. While Dia lacks the extensive library
of pre-defined "shapes", it is a service-able alternative. My girlfriend and our daughter often
use GIMP, InkScape and Dia, together, to make things even the marketing people at their employers
are impressed with)
Video, Jesus Christ no
I've never done video editing, but I've met and talked with the people behind
Adventures of Jack UZI.
A completely amateur crew. They used OpenShot for editing. As bad as it is, I don't think it
was OpenShot that was the problem. I've seen worse work done by professionals.
For audio, maybe things are a bit better
I've used both Ardour (open source) and Mixbus (from Harrison Consoles). Both work very well on
Linux. For a while, there was a boot-able demo DVD for Mixbus. It was based on Linux. (now, they
just have a downloadable demo version). My daughter uses Mixxx on her Linux laptop for DJ'ing.
We both use Focusrite Scarlett series audio interfaces with no problems.
Is it good for gaming? Well... it's not as bad as it once was, but Windows is still
the easy #1.
We aren't much into gaming, so can't debate this. (My GF and I like Warframe. Our daughter
used to like Aion (until the game got severely nerfed). We all 3 occasionally enjoy racing in
Super Tux Kart.
Is it good for the enterprise? No, bad spreadsheets, no Outlook, security mostly
through obscurity.
Outside of the finance department, at my employer, previous employers and my GF's and
daughter's employers, LibreOffice Calc is more than sufficient for the spreadsheets we
encounter. (For advanced mathematics, we use wxMaxima, which is open source. We
use this instead of either Excel or LibreOffice Calc because it's a better tool for
the advanced math we do.)
Using WinApps or PlayOnLinux, Outlook runs fine on Linux. Also, if your Exchange server
has Exchange Web Services enabled, there are open source EWS clients.
As for security, thanks, in part, to the US National Security Agency (and other contributors),
Linux has built-in security features that require expensive add-ons for MS Windows. The NSA
does use Linux in high security, compartmentalized, need-to-know-only applications. And,
the NSA continues to contribute enhancements to Linux.
Also, Linux has a variety of anti-malware packages available.
For our respective employers, our teams do collaborative product development on Linux - with
no more hassle than on MS Windows. We and our teams say Linux shines in our enterprise
environments.